Science Fiction Though the Decades

Monday, October 28, 2013

1930: Last and First Men (Stapledon, Olaf)

Superlative: prophetic, expansive,
and ingenious (5/5)

I tend to avoid early twentieth
century science fiction because of the vapid plots, hollow characters, and
abject cheesiness of the material. Case in point: E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark
of Space (1928)—hated it. When I hear about a recommended book from the
same era, I tend to file that suggestion in the trash bin. However, when I read
Brian Aldiss’ Farewell, Fantastic Venus (1968) anthology, I was floored
by the imagination of one particular story, an excerpt from Last and
First Men. I had known the name of the author, Olaf Stapledon, but never
thought it sounded good—vapid, hollow, and cheesy are the words that instantly
sprang to mind. Reading the excerpt smashed that ignorant assumption of mine.

Thankfully, I was in the right
time at the right place when I found a brand-new edition of this book for a
mere ninety-six baht (US$3.10). I snapped it up and filed it away on my overloaded
bookshelf to one day be read. As a long holiday neared (October 20-23), I opened
the book during my commute, then during my lunches, then in the evening in bed,
then on the bus to my destination. I was hooked.

Rear cover synopsis:

“Evolution is an astonishing
thing.

Over the next billion years
human civilisations will rise and fall like waves on the shore, each one rising
from savagery to an ever-advancing technological peak before falling back and
being surpassed.

This extraordinary, imaginative
and ambitious novel is full of pioneering speculations about the nature of
evolution, terraforming, genetic engineering and the savage, progressive nature
of man.”

------------

Brian Aldiss has called this
book “great classical ontological epic prose poems” (vi) and inspired the minds
of great men; among them: Arthur C. Clark, Freeman Dyson, and Winston Churchill.
I’ll respect Aldiss’ advice! My Gollancz edition (UK, 2009) has a forward by
Gregory Benford (v-vii), an author who I have little interest in after the
disastrous reads of In the Ocean of Night (1977) and Timescape
(1980). His 3-page forward, while moderately insightful, offers the following
advice:

[S]imply skip the first four parts and
begin with The Fall of the First Man [Chapter V]. This eliminates the
antique quality of the book and also tempers the rather repetitive cycle of
rise and fall that becomes rather monotonous. (vii)

Audacious! This is terrible
advice, which confirms my already dislike for Benford. Considering its
publication in 1930, the first four chapter of Last and First Men are an
amazingly prophetic portrait of the world after World War II with the
continuation of the Americanized world into the twenty-first century and America’s
bipolar relationship with China. Consider these prophetic words:

In the Far West, the United States of America
openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and
envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency
very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character
of man's existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made
use of American products … the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph
and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought … What
wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded
the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been
able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be
propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could
get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments.
And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people's baser members, the
whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably
corrupted. (21-22)

Those are true words for this
American expat, who renounces most of American television, political rhetoric,
slovenly dietary habits, and the obsession with consumerism. Olaf Stapleton in
his preface (ix-xii) to Last and First Men says, “American readers … may
feel that their great nation is given a somewhat unattractive part in the
story. I have imagined the triumph of a cruder sort of Americanism … May this
not occur in the real world!” (xi). Sorry Olaf, your worst fears materializes
much sooner than you prophesized! Further, “Some readers, taking my story to be
an attempt at prophecy, may deem it unwarrantably pessimistic. But it is nor
prophecy; it is myth, or an essay in myth” (xi). Sadly, what started as an
exercise in moldable myth became a monopole of reality.

The first four chapters aren’t as
weighty as Benford suggests; they are rich with insight and chock full of
ominous signs for the next few hundred, thousand, million and billion years of
human evolution.

Chapter I: Balkan Europe

Compounded pride and
ignorance, ever the silent pusher in human affairs, claim the lives of many
in the Anglo-French War. Thereafter, nationalism is seen as a swarthy agent
of a nation’s demise, yet, when fingers are pointed they point both ways.
With global interests of economy, America plays a tepid role in affairs,
unacting themselves yet always nosy in the mind’s eye of the population;
thus, the poisoning of the Russo-German war.

“Like most wars, the Angelo-French War had
increased the desire for peace, yet made peace less secure” (18).

Chapter II: Europe’s
Downfall

After Europe’s bickering
divided the continent, America fills the vacuum of power. Globalizing the
world with American products, America is “respected for their enterprise” yet
“universally feared and envied” (21). Suspicious of competition and resistance,
America makes its military pressure known with airbases and flyovers, one of
which happens at the wrong time at the wrong place; thus, leading to a
European megadeath and global fear of simply criticizing the powerful nation.

“For in a declining civilization it is
often the old who see furthest and see
with the youngest eyes” (28).

Chapter III: America and
China

Though as Americanized as the
rest of the world in regards to media, language, and habit, China arises to
become America’s chief global counterbalance of influence. Cultural
differences divide the populous nations of China and India, yet America
allies itself with Russian mysticism and China allies itself with the
rigorous Germans. With the globe divided by the influence of the two nations,
conflict can be sparked form noble beginnings and be fueled by patriotism.

“America was balanced between the will
merely to effect an economy and political unification or the world, and a
fanatical craving to impose American culture on the East” (45).

Chapter IV: An
Americanized Planet

Nearly four hundred years
after the European War (Chapter I), a World State and its President of the
World are established. Science, empirical thought held in such high regard it
borders on mysticism, impregnates the daily life of each citizen who all
revere the mysterious greatness of the ancient Chinese scientist Gordelpus,
the Prime Mover. However, having expended Earth’s sources of oil, they are
left to rely on Antarctica’s veins of coal.

“[T]his age, for more than the notorious
‘nineteenth century’, was the great age of barren complacency” (61).

Chapter V: The Fall of the
First Men

With the utter eclipse of the
World State and, with it, the knowledge and pride, so too befalls the glory
of Man in progress. The Dark Ages settle in for many millennia yet geological
processes continue unabated, without care for Man or his progress. From the
fragments of Man rise a fledging civilization in the landmass of the once
South Atlantic who rediscover their ancestor’s greatness and, with it, its
power for destruction and cruelty.

Only twenty-eight hearty,
intelligent souls survived the megadeath of the epic subterranean blast and
found purchase on an inhabitable tract of land in northern Siberia. A schism
physically divides the settlement—one half of the survivors staying on the
coats and the other half crossing the seas… only to slowing devolve to
barbarianism. Even the cultured and learned settlement found itself helpless
to their natural state of inbred infertility and inflexibility.

“[T]hey had no longer the capacity to
profit much from the new clemency of nature … Little by little this scanty
human race degenerated into a mere remnant of Arctic savages” (107).

Chapter VII: The Rise of
the Second men

From the dregs of the First
man’s ultimate Dark Age arose a passive species of its very descent.
Meanwhile, across the great continental divide of mountains, a lesser form of
man had devolved among simians which developed superior intellectual capacity;
yet, these capacities were limited when compared to the great Siberian
intellect. Jealousy leaves a rift and the demise of both races, regardless of
a zenith for sexual revival, soon approached.

“So much, in the fullness of time, could be
achieved, even without mechanical power, by a species gifted with high
intelligence and immune from anti-social self-regard” (121).

Chapter VIII: The Martians

Near a village in the Alpine
peaks, a green cloud-cum-jelly descended from the sky to temporarily terrorize
the curious and unfortunate. The cloud, actually a supermind of
ultra-microscopic Martian entities, soon depart for unknown reasons, but the
alien mind of the Martian individual and group psyche are as irrational as
the minds of men. While advanced and industrious, the Martians are also
flawed by a type of monomania.

“The Martians were in many ways extremely
well equipped for mental progress and for true spiritual adventure, but …
they were driven to thwart their own struggling spirits at every turn” (142).

Chapter IX: Earth and Mars

Millennia pass as recurrent
intrusions by the Martians, each time being defeated by the crafty Second
Men, but each time diminishing Man’s will to fight. Eventually, complete colonization of the
Earth is accomplished by the Martians and further study of the humans reveals
their intellectual capacity. Self-confidence is found in Man who then defeat
the Martians, but not before lassitude, lingering Martian saboteurs, and
starvation change Man’s nature.

“[T]hey had determined to see their own
racial tragedy as a thing of beauty, and they had failed” (155).

Chapter X: The Third Men
in the Wilderness

Freed from the yolk of
Martian overrule and ushered into diversity from a glacial period, the Third
Men evolved to become of special aural talent. Keen hunters yet also keen
manipulators, the Third Men found a particular pleasure in the godliness of
pain and considered its affliction upon lesser beings high excellent as it
brought about “vivid psychic reality” (166). Fond of music, objective versus
subjective harmony resulted in a chasm of displeasure.

“[T]hough sometimes capable of a
penetrating mystical intuition, they never seriously disciplined themselves
under philosophy, nor tried to relate their mystical intuitions with the rest
of their experience” (165).

Chapter XI: Man Remakes
Himself

Savvy of manipulating germ
cells and with a maniacal drive to create the most supreme mind, the Third
Men are able to create a superior mind with a vestigial body then, simply, a
massive mind capable to incredible intellectual feats… and only that. The
Great Minds then produces further Great Minds, thus producing the Fourth Men.
Exterminating the pests and peasants of the Third Men, the Great Minds create
their own version of human perfection, mobile yet brilliant—the artificial
Fifth Men.

“[I]n both science and art man kept
recurring again and again to the ancient themes, to work over them once more
in meticulous detail and strike from them new truth and new beauty” (204).

Chapter XII: The Last
Terrestrials

Telapathically linked as a
whole, death much distressed the Fifth Men, whose lifespans reached upwards
of 50,000 years. they yearned for the truth of an afterlife and found that
the past was still tangible, thus began their obsession with remotely viewing
the past. Never deceived, the Fifth Men also had to look forward to the
terraforming of Venus because Earth’s destiny was to be sealed by its fateful
dance with its orbiting moon.

“[Q]uite early in their career they
discovered an unexpected beauty in the very fact that the individual must die
… immortality, they held, would lead to spiritual disaster” (206).

Chapter XIII: Humanity on
Venus

With the
native Venerians destroyed, the Fifth Men were slowly able to evolve, with
much hardship, into the Sixth Men, a species which highly valued the beauty
of flight. Their unremarkable, depressing existence gave way to the most
splendid , rapturous species of Flying Men—the Seventh Men. Through gaiety
and bliss, their short lives focused little on the sciences, so they bore the
Eighth men—sturdy, intelligent, diligent, and unexpectedly unprepared to
settle the planet Neptune.

“It was inevitable that flight should
obsess man on Venus … the riotous efflorescence of avian species shamed man’s
pedestrian habits” (230).

Chapter XIV: Neptune

Ill-equipped for the barren
wastelands of northern Neptune, the Ninth Men quickly suffered and devolved
for millions of years, only occasionally arising to a brief flicker of
intelligence. So went the proceeding Men, failures of their own success,
until the Fifteenth Men, who “set themselves to abolish five great evils,
namely, diseases, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, ill-will”
(251). Aware of their flaws, they created the Sixteenth Men, who devised the
Seventeenth Men…

“Little by little, civilization crumbled
into savagery, the torturing vision of better things was lost, man’s
consciousness was narrowed and coarsened into brute-consciousness. By good
luck the brute precariously survived” (246).

Chapter XV: The Last Men

The Eighteenth Men are the best
adapted, longest living, and most conscious of the past, present, and future,
yet they also know that they are to be the Last Men. They have lived the
reality of a billion years of trial and error toward “harmonious complexity
of form” and “the awakening of the spirit into unity, knowledge, delight and
self-expression” (275). Life their evolution, the cosmos is very beautiful
yet also very terrible and tragic.

“[E]ach individual has his own private
needs, which he heartily craves to fulfil; but also … he subordinates these
private cravings to the good of the race absolutely and without struggle”
(265).

Chapter XVI: The Last of
Man

Inevitable cosmic disaster
bestows the Eighteenth Men with a great task: continue the two billion-year
music of Man’s evolution or return the entire effort to stellar dust. Though
slipping into anarchy and tribalism, the Men strive to produce intergalactic
spore of Man which may seed a planet and continue mankind’s tragic history,
though the possibly remains remote. The certain blaze of oncoming death,
however, spurs a final brotherly effort to reconcile.

“[I]n the vast music of existence the
actual theme of mankind now ceases for ever … The stored experience of many
mankinds must sink into oblivion” (284).

Consider the wise words of Thich
Nhat Hanh: “Civilisations have been destroyed many
times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think
of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little.
The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.”
This modern Buddhist philosopher’s words echo what Olaf Stapledon, a British
philosopher from decades earlier. By Chapter XIV, Stapledon begins to wax
lyrically about the petty existence of Mankind in terms of the lifespan of the
cosmos: “[T]he whole duration of humanity … is but a flash in the lifetime of
the cosmos” (244), and yet, even at the crescendo of consciousness which bestow
the wise Men of the Last Men, Man still lies prone to all disasters which maybe
come, be they cosmic or man-made:

At
any stage of his career he might easily have been exterminated by some slight alteration
of his chemical environment, by a more than usually malignant microbe, by a
radical change of climate, or by the manifold effects of his own folly.
(281)

Doris Lessing, in her afterword (295-297), cites four authors who
admired Olaf Stapledon’s work: Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, and
Theodore Sturgeon. This impressive list of admirers is flattery enough, but, as
Charles Caleb Colton had said, imitation is sincerest form of flattery. Three
books epitomize this flattery:

(1) Aldiss’s own flattery in the form of imitation comes from his
collection Starswarm (1964) where Man has settled 10,000 new worlds over
one million years. These myriad “descendants of the inhabitants of Old Earth” (Signet,
1964) exhibit radical changes in society, in culture, and in physical form.

(2) Jack L. Chalker, best know his endless series of quests, wrote
a quadrilogy entitled The Rings of the Master, which starts with Lords of
the Middle Dark (1986). The proceeding three books explore Mankind which had
been deliberately dispersed by Earth’s Master system and the cast’s attempt to
retrieve the necessary rings to disable the System. Each world is home to an
exotic form of Mankind, forcibly evolved to adapt to the planet’s climate.

(3) John Brunner’s A Maze of Stars (1991) is an amazing
stereoscopic view of mankind’s evolving and devolving amid “the six hundred
planets” which “had been seeded with human stock by the greatest feat of
technology ever achieved” by The Ship. The Ship’s duty is to visit, time and
again, each of the worlds it had seeded, for better or worse.

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Regardless of its 83-year age, this book has stood the test of
time, rendering it a testament to imagination to a magnificent scale, foresight
on an epic scale, and intuitiveness of a grand scale. The decades haven’t been
as kind to some science fiction books as is has been to Last and First Men—Asimov’s
Foundation (1951) has a terribly dated feeling and Clarke’s Childhood’s
End (1953) now feels limp and lackluster.

Disregard Gregory Benford’s simple-minded advice of ignoring the first
four chapters of Last and First Men (a sixth of the entire book) because
Stapledon’s ingenuity starts even before the first chapter, it starts in his
preface; disregard people who dislike a book without a protagonist or central character
because Mankind’s potential is the highlight here, and disregard my own opinion…
this needs to be read.

2 comments:

And it seems the perfect book on which to write 3,000 words! I've read Stapledon's Star Maker, and like your reaction to Last and First Men, was floored by it. I've been trying to get a copy of the latter ever since - a fact made only more obvious by your review.

I thought this book went out of print a while ago, but the cover you show above looks like a reprint. Is it?

Also, you reference books near the end of the review by Aldiss, Chalker, and Brunner. Have you read any of them, i.e. are they worthy "flattery"? Aldiss and Brunner I trust enough to pick up anything by them, but Chalker is a name I'm not familiar with.

I have the British 2009 edition from Gollancz. And yes, I read all three of those books mentioned at the end. Starswarm and The Maze of Stars are both really great, both come highly recommended! However, Jack L. Chalker is more famous for his fantasy quests (usually 4 books long) as well as Well of Souls, but The Rings of the Master series is good but comes with a shrug of "whatever".